Posts Tagged ‘new features’

Crons in the Cloud!

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

We’re pleased to announce the addition of crons to the PiCloud platform. A cron is a simple way to schedule a function to be run periodically. Time and dates are specified using the standard crontab format. Crons can be triggered as often as every minute, and there’s no limit to the number of functions you can register as crons. You will be billed for the amount of compute time consumed by the function triggered by your cron–just like if you were running a function on PiCloud. We have also added a tab to the web interface for managing crons.

Here’s how to register a cron:

# registers function ping_webserver with the label heartbeat
# this function could be checking whether a webservice is active
cloud.cron.register(ping_webserver, 'heartbeat', '* * * * *') # runs every minute

When you no longer need a cron, you can deregister it via our web interface or using the following:

# deregister function ping_webserver with the label heartbeat
cloud.cron.deregister('ping_webserver')

Here’s a function that runs once a day at noon.

# 19 is the 19th GMT hour, which translates to 12pm PDT (GMT -7)
cloud.cron.register(sudo_make_me_a_sandwich, 'lunch', '0 19 * * *')

That’s all it takes! See our documentation for the full cron specification.

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Store your files with PiCloud!

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

One of the most frequent questions we get is “where do I put my data?” To this, we’ve always had the same answer: Anywhere you want. Unlike other platforms, we’ve never believed in locking in your data into our proprietary data store. Our users keep data in all sorts of different places (AWS, Rackspace, or on their local machines), and in all different forms (flat files, relational databases, and key stores). We don’t plan to change this, because we don’t believe we can provide the single best data storage solution to satisfy everyone’s needs. We’re big fans of using the correct tool for every problem.

So what is our new file storage solution? It’s a simple and easy way for our users to get their data on the cloud to be crunched by PiCloud. We don’t pretend that it’s the holy grail of data storage solutions, but it’s a solid answer for users who don’t already have a data store setup. If you don’t need it, you won’t be affected.

The module is included in our cloud library as cloud.files. Here’s the most basic way to use it:

cloud.files.put('data.txt') # stores data.txt on the cloud
cloud.files.get('data.txt') # saves data.txt onto your machine
cloud.files.getf('data.txt') # gets a stream of the contents of data.txt

See our documentation for the full specification and examples.

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New Users, New Features, and PyCon!

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Wait no longer! We’ve opened up PiCloud to another batch of users today, and from now onward, we promise to accelerate the roll out of PiCloud to new users. For users, both new and old, I wanted to highlight some of the many changes we’ve made in the past month that haven’t necessarily been the most visible.

Variable Compute Units
We had customers asking us for more powerful CPUs, and so we’ve delivered. With a simple keyword argument change, you can now switch between using 1 Compute Unit (1-1.2 ghz Xeon) to 2.5 Compute Units (2.5-3ghz Xeon). Check it out (code):

cloud.call(cpu_intensive_func, _high_cpu=True) # uses 2.5 compute units

Profiler Option
While we’ve gotten great feedback for profiling functions that run on PiCloud, we’ve also received requests to have the ability to turn off the profiler. After all, the deterministic profiler does have overhead that scales with the number of function calls in a script. To turn off the profiler, it’s simply another keyword argument _profile.

cloud.call(foo, _profiler=False)

Drop in for multiprocessing
If you’re already using Python multiprocessing, but want to run your computation across our cluster, now you can. Check out our docs to see how.

cloud library is now open source
We told users before that the client library was not open sourced, because frankly, we didn’t believe it was stable enough to deserve the attention of developers in the community. We are now at that point, so the client library has been released with an LGPL license.

Inclusion in the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD)
EPD is ideal for scientists and engineers looking for an easy, standardized way to deploy a powerful set of scientific tools on their own computer or across a whole organization. As of the latest EPD release, 6.0, the cloud library is now included in the distribution. Welcome EPD customers!

Bug fixes
Having hundreds of users using our platform is the easiest way to expose all the nitty-gritty bugs and race conditions that are lurking in our system. We would like to thank our ever-growing community for the many bug reports and critical fixes we have had over the past month.

Lastly, our CTO, Aaron Staley, and I will be at PyCon this weekend. Hope to see you all there!

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